Belly Up Page 10
DECOR
THERE WAS A PERIOD of my life in which my primary source of income came from being a piece of furniture. I worked for a business that sold sofas that cost over six times what I was paid in a year. The showroom was on the twenty-fourth floor of a beautiful modern building in the Flatiron District of Manhattan. There was no storefront. It was a word-of-mouth business. If you were rich enough, you knew about it. The clients were Saudi princes looking to spend $80,000 on a dining table; creative directors of high-end fashion companies looking to overhaul their runway seating, buy a million or two million dollars’ worth of luxury benches; hobbled old Upper East Side women redesigning their Hampton homes, budgets of five million and up just to acquire objects, things to fill the spaces they already owned.
A big floor-to-ceiling stainless-steel door opened from the hallway into the show space. Inside the show space were several interior configurations—dining rooms and living rooms and bedrooms set up on circles of carpet—living quarters that in real life would have been divided but here, in the showroom, were smashed up against each other without any walls. And on the other side of the imaginary rooms, just below the big windows, was me, at a long grand desk, in a pencil skirt. I was a pretty, young girl who brought the clients almonds and glasses of wine. I also opened the mail, coordinated the shipping, and did a great deal of filing. But I understood that my primary purpose was my presence. I added to the atmosphere, my employers told me. I added something to the experience of the showroom that my colleagues, all gay men over fifty, couldn’t provide.
My colleagues loved having me in the showroom. They said I was beautiful. They said I dressed fashionably. They said my short hair was avant-garde. It is true that I do like beautiful clothing. I feel most at home in prints that are loud. I like objects that startle me when I look at them.
I didn’t mind being looked at as much at the beginning. One man, during the early months of my employment, came into the showroom and asked to take photographs of me sitting on the furniture. He said he wanted a human element in the pictures, something that would help him remember the proportions and size. I sat on the chaise lounge and curled my high-heeled feet up under me. I put my hands behind my head and tried to look deadpan. Perfect, said the man. He never bought anything. I would have known if he had because I filed all the orders, knew exactly who bought what and how much money was coming in.
When I opened the mail, there were often requests for samples, architects or interior designers wanting to see a swatch of the wood grain or the fabric or the leather used on a particular design. In the morning I made a stack of the letters that requested swatches. In the afternoon I went into the back room, a dingy windowless closet, and found what each person wanted and then sent them the sample. Sometimes people also requested catalogs or lookbooks, big-format photographs of the furniture placed in front of the ocean on a sandy beach, a ridiculous situation akin to a woman in a ball gown on an elephant, which, in fashion magazines, you do often see.
I had been working in the showroom for six months when I got the letter. I didn’t immediately know if I was going to show it to my boss. It was a nondescript, cheap business envelope. The showroom address and the return address were written by hand. The return address said State Correctional Institution—Frackville, Pennsylvania. Inside the envelope was a piece of paper that appeared to be a photocopy of a letter that had been typed on a typewriter. The paper had the lines and dark spots that come with a sloppily executed photocopy. Stapled to the letter was a note the size of Post-it that said I, the recipient, should be aware that all prison correspondence is read and monitored. The letter itself was short, but alarmingly articulate. The contents were very strange and upsetting. The worst part about it was how overly formal the whole thing was. It said:
Dear Sir or Madam,
You do not know me, and so I understand that it will therefore be difficult to persuade you to perform the task which I request. My name is Malcolm Danvers and I am currently incarcerated. I spend most of my time in solitary confinement. Alone in this black box I have little joy. Therefore, I have taken to imagining for myself a new home. A new structure that I could build upon my release, a modern structure that I could build in the woods and live in. After being here, in this cell for so long, I no longer believe I am fit for human company. So the only thing I can do, the only thing that keeps me alive, is to imagine a beautiful life for myself, alone, outside this prison. An architecturally stunning feat that brings in lots of light. I have read many books, while imprisoned, on drafting architectural plans and have thus, in the last two years, already established an achievable blueprint. I am now at the stage where interiors must be considered. I have been made to understand that your pieces are some of the best, some of the most elegant in the business, and that any one of your designs can be custom-made. This aspect of your product is of great interest to me because it allows me an even greater breadth of imagination. Therefore, I have a request of you. If you can, would you be kind enough to send me several catalogs of your best-selling pieces, and also some samples, so that I might imagine more vividly the furniture in my woods-circled home? Any leather or fabric swatches would be of great value to me. Unfortunately, due to the constraints of my situation, I cannot accept fabric or leather samples bigger than 1˝ × 1˝ because of their potential to be used as a weapon. Similarly, I am unable to accept any wood or metal samples because of their violent potential. Thank you, dear sir or madam, for considering this request. I realize that in your office and your life you are, no doubt, a person of extreme importance and already under a great deal of demands as it stands. Any time you could take to send me some samples and catalogs would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps it will give you joy, at least, to picture some of your beautiful furniture in the home of my imagination, looking elegant and stunning in the morning light.
In gratitude,
Mr. Malcolm Danvers
I remember putting the letter down in something of a panic. I feared someone was watching me, as I often feared during the workday. My colleagues were very nosy and frequently asked me what I was doing, what I was working on, which task I had at hand. I knew that if I showed the letter to my boss he would be disgusted and make me throw it away. I may have been wrong about this, but I could sense they would not think the letter was of interest. They would probably be primarily concerned with trying to figure out how this man in jail had gotten our name. I couldn’t decide what to do so I put the letter in my purse and brought it home with me that evening.
I knew I could probably find out online what this man had done to land himself in prison. But then I thought that this was, maybe, something I didn’t want to know. Perhaps if I were a better person, I would have looked it up immediately. But I had been made aware, during this time in my life, that I was not as good a person as many of my friends were, specifically when it came to contemplating the death penalty, which it seemed Mr. Malcolm Danvers was not at risk for. But maybe he had narrowly escaped. What I mean is, in the social circles I associated with, there were a lot of young liberal-minded people, people who were sexual extremists and in polyamorous relationships and who also were deeply invested in prison reform, despite never having had contact with a prisoner in their entire lives. It was not acceptable to believe in the death penalty, in my social group, and I had been alarmed, at recent evening gatherings and gallery openings, that when the subject of the death penalty came up, I found myself sympathetic. People were bad and they did terrible things. What use was it keeping these bad people alive?
This wasn’t an opinion I voiced, ever. It would have been socially unacceptable to say out loud that perhaps some people are meant to die. Also, I usually didn’t say much, so it would have been out of character for me to blurt it out. It just seemed to me, as I had experienced in my own life, that true evil did exist and that when it did infect someone it was incurable, and that those people should be killed. I thought of a man from my hometown who broke into fifteen houses and raped f
ourteen women. This man, I thought, should be dead. I could not conceive of a reason why this man should be alive. What was more, because he had not killed any of the women he would be, after seventeen years, released back out into the world. When I was sixteen and these crimes were being committed, I thought about killing him.
But what I mean to say is that I knew that because of my belief in true evil I could not look up the crimes of Mr. Malcolm Danvers. If I did and it was bad enough, then I would not be able to think about him or contemplate any further his imagined home. I wanted to give Danvers the samples because I wanted the feeling of privilege I’d get from giving another human an object of his wanting. If I looked him up I might not be able to send him any fabric swatches or obtain any possible joy from giving him these things because there would be a possibility that I would want to kill him. If I were another person—a bigger, smarter, more intellectual person—perhaps I could have immediately stomached whatever he had done, but I knew I wasn’t, and I still wanted, for a little while longer, to think of him as human, so I did not look him up and the next morning went into the showroom and sent him the samples and the catalogs straightaway.
After I sent him the package, I felt good immediately. I sat at my big beautiful desk under those grand twenty-fourth-story windows and basked in the sun. I had signed my return letter with my real name. I told him, Here you are, Mr. Malcolm Danvers, may your home be every bit as beautiful as you have imagined. Yours, Ursula G.
I remember very vividly the rest of that day. Three clients came in and I was exceptionally friendly and sat with them while they drank their wine and talked about the problems they were having training a new dog. I remember specifically Mrs. Sheffield, one of our better Upper East Side old women clients, saying that her poodle refused to pee anywhere but everywhere. I thought of the $100,000 Turkish rug we had sold her the month previous. I hoped that the dog had made a pee river on that rug and really let its bowels run free.
Perhaps getting the letter was a turning point for my time in the showroom. When the letter came, I had been there about six months, long enough for the novelty to wear off and for me to figure out exactly what, regarding the purpose of my presence, was going on. I was so grateful for the job when I got it. Before I worked at the showroom I worked for a Chelsea boutique folding $300 T-shirts and steaming silk dresses in a windowless basement after the store closed. My usual work hours had been from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. I listened to my iPod while I folded and felt very claustrophobic and very depressed. Perhaps a smarter person would have found some way to multitask, some way to use that time more effectively, but all I could feel while I was folding was that I was suffocating in a dark room, which I very well might have been, so when I got the job at the showroom through a friend of a friend, I felt I had landed in a palace on the moon. I mean, there were many things about the showroom that were both moonlike and palacelike. The world that lived in the showroom was completely detached from the world I knew. It was a place where the wealthiest people on the planet could act as if the way they lived their lives was acceptable. And even the furniture, the made-up room configurations, seemed to exist in a space devoid of gravity—free-floating rooms attached to nothing that simply implied life or the way someone might live a life in a home that did not actually contain humans or anything that was alive. And the palatial quality of it all, of being in a space where everything was the finest, made by the finest designers with the finest materials by the finest Italian craftsmen, implied that this was the best man could do: here in the showroom we were at the pinnacle of human creation. The best things money could buy, myself among them. It felt good to be around such fine things.
So at first, as I said, I didn’t mind being viewed and being part of the furniture, because it felt good to be considered suitable company for such beautiful objects, and I had, before coming to the showroom, been a ghost that lived only at night, in the basement of a boutique, folding things and wishing I were smart enough to imagine a way out.
A month passed before I got another letter from Mr. Malcolm Danvers. It came the same way, in the mail, typed on a typewriter but photocopied, only this time he also sent architectural plans and it was addressed to me, Ms. Ursula G., which obviously caused me a great deal of alarm. I worried someone else in the showroom had seen it. It said:
My Dear Ursula,
Words cannot express the gratitude I feel for you. The leather you sent me is perfect for the low modern sofa I’ve put in the living room, and I am using several of the fabric samples you provided on lounge chairs throughout the house. Specifically, that dark gray linen has been upholstered on a design I saw and tore out from a feature on Italian innovators in Architectural Digest. As you can see from the attached blueprints, your signature low sofa is perfect for the space in the left corner of the living room. I cut out the photo of it from the catalog you mailed and have taped it on the wall right next to my bed, where I lay my head to rest at night, along with your fabric and leather samples, so that I see my house, and your beautiful furniture in it, right before I sleep. I can think of no way to repay you for the gorgeous furniture you have gifted my imagination. I only wish I could have you over to my home, in its finished state, to serve you tea and to be able to show you all the magnificent work I have done and with which you have so graciously aided. Perhaps I can imagine this exchange, even if it never will, in the world outside this black box, transpire? If you feel generous, and would like to come to tea, send me a photo of yourself, and I will imagine you inside my beautiful home sitting on some of your stunningly designed modern furniture, me serving you tea and maybe some fresh biscuits.
Yours,
Mr. Malcolm Danvers
I believe I shook slightly as I looked at the architectural plans. I remember sweating a great deal. They were well drawn and very professional looking. I wouldn’t have been able to tell they were done by an amateur, let alone by a prisoner. I saw our signature low sofa drawn in miniature in the living room, just as Danvers had noted, and I saw the dark gray linen lounge chair, drawn in acute detail, smaller than the head of an eraser, in a room marked STUDY, and several more notations that communicated other furniture that he must have found from other companies, convinced other people to send to him and to correspond with him. It made me feel a little better that I was not the only one helping him build this home of his imagination. But it also made me feel a little jealous. I had been taken by the idea that I was somehow a unique savior to him, that I alone was helping his dream live on. I mean, I had been taken by the nature of it from the beginning, the idea that someone who lived only in darkness could build for themselves another world to inhabit. It was romantic. And deeply human, this notion that someone would want to construct for themselves a home they could never have, a home they could only ever go to when they closed their eyes.
But Danvers seemed to be somewhat convinced that he might actually get out and that he might actually be able to make his plans a reality. So then I had to reckon with the idea that I could, possibly, be helping him build a hideout, someplace for him to go after he had been released. I was very upset, thinking that this man, a man who probably did do something that would make me wish him dead, wanted to have me over in a room in his imagination.
It was a busy day in the showroom and I had lots to do, so I put the letter and the architectural plans in my purse and got to filing. By the time I got off work, my nerves had calmed. That evening I went to a dinner party, a long-standing arrangement where I would meet three friends of mine, some of the friends from the gallery openings, at one of their apartments for a meal. I picked up a bottle of wine on my way. I didn’t plan to say anything about Mr. Malcolm Danvers at dinner, but then I had three glasses of wine and it just kind of came out. Marie, the woman whose apartment I was in, asked me about my day at work, and I told her about the letter. Everyone else became very interested in what I was saying and wanted to listen in. Suzanne, Marie’s closest friend, said she felt very bad for Danvers, w
hat a horror our prison system was, simple barbarism. Marie asked if I had been able to find out what Mr. Malcolm Danvers had done. No, I admitted, I didn’t want to know. You should look it up, said Marie, especially now that he has asked for your picture, don’t you want to know what he has done so you can better gauge how to respond to his letter? None of these people could sense my hidden belief that some people deserved to die. They wanted to look Danvers up, right then and there, but I begged them not to. No, I said, please, I don’t want to know.
In an attempt to distract them, to change the subject, I pulled out the architectural plans that Danvers had attached to his second letter. I showed them the signature low sofa and the linen lounge chair and they oohed and aahed. Stephen, Marie’s boyfriend, who I had forgotten was an architect, examined the plans very intently and said, It’s a glass house, these demarcations here on the side mean the paneling should be glass instead of wood. That makes sense to me, I told him. Danvers said he wanted to let all the light in, I guess that’s what I would want too if I were trapped indoors. Everyone at the dinner thought this was very beautiful, Mr. Malcolm Danvers’s desire for beauty and a home and light, and Suzanne said it was everything she could do to keep from crying.
This angered me slightly. Nobody seemed concerned that Danvers wanted a picture of me to put in his home, that he wanted me to be there with him in the woods in his glass house having a cup of tea. It occurred to me then that in this group of friends, I might also be a piece of furniture. Was I something they kept around because I looked avant-garde? I suppose it was at this dinner party that I first reflected on whether or not the kind of life I was living was lonely. And if the type of life I was living was lonely, what other lives were there? Why did I feel so wholly inanimate? Why did I feel so completely that I was stuffed in a tightly sealed box? I had made great efforts to relieve myself of this boxness. I dressed adventurously. I consumed art. I read widely. So why did the idea that I, like Mr. Malcolm Danvers, might too need an imaginary house to build seem so true?